– IT managers play a critical role in promoting diversity and limiting burnout

– DevOps initiatives launched solely by C-level

– People that understand WHY will feel empowered to help create the WHAT and HOW

At the moment, we rely way too much on the tools when implementing DevOps, and it so much more than tools.

Everything starts with smart leadership. Leadership in IT means creating the right type of environment, view of life, the right type of purpose, where we could use and learn from technology.

As business owners and managers how much time do we spend with people, talking and listening?

Leadership is about purposefully seeking the problems and solving them, addressing the challenges in our environment.

Leadership presupposes:

– Listening – need to listen to each other challenges, and then we have to work together to find a way to deal with it. That leads to problem-solving and being a team.

– Teaching – There should be a person who needs to deal with it and to own it. Someone who could teach and guide the rest of the team towards DevOps principles. This person should be able to actively work across the company to find a better way to work.

– Support – However, those changes and activities require support. It requires support getting the information to the team, addressing the challenge and meeting the deadline that was given. It requires support of all the different vendors as it is important to make sure that they are involved if you going to make something end-to-end. We need to turn vendors into partners to make sure the communication and mutual understanding is on-point. We need to make them a part of our organization and treat the accordingly so that they understood key performance metrics and keep up to those. We need the support of business managers so that we could go talk to them and find out more and see if the solutions and measure are appropriate. People all throughout the organization should be actively involved. Don’t forget about the Service Desk. They’re the most honest people in the company, the are the ones who are dealing with clients’ issues on a daily basis.

The key elements of smart leadership:

Encouragement- Have the flexibility and have the honesty to go and try something and see the results achieved.

Teamwork is an indispensable element in supporting the leadership and a real teamwork is one of the best results that can be achieved through smart leadership.

Learning something new from the people you work with can lead far and make you a better leader.

DevOps likes being tested, you need to try out new ideas to see how they work for you and your team. This way you can measure and improve all the time.

It is important to celebrate the results achieved, to bring everyone to the table and discuss what the team was trying to achieve and how it worked for them.

Top Tip from Daniel: To get the right thing at the right time in front of the right people for the right reason is what DevOps (Agile, lean and ITSM) is all about. The best feedback is with the people using your product so go out and see as soon as you can.

In this article, we’ve outlined just a few highlights of the speech that we wanted to share. Please, share your experience and views on the topic, we welcome any feedback.